


Intermission: Years in the Past

by Almost_Artistic



Series: The Culling Games [2]
Category: Homestuck, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Character Death, Depression, Dirk's Love Kills People, Emotional Manipulation, Exhaustion, Forced Pregnancy, Forced Relationship, Grief, Kurloz Being a Vengeful Creeper, Medical Experimentation, Multi, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicide Attempt, Time Shenanigans, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-23
Updated: 2014-06-23
Packaged: 2018-02-05 22:53:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1835206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Almost_Artistic/pseuds/Almost_Artistic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An interlude of past events.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intermission: Years in the Past

**Author's Note:**

> Looooooong hiatus, folks, so sorry about that! But now my hell semester and summer classes are over, and my poor swamped beta had a chance to finish looking over the intermission, so you have a long chunk of scenes, hopefully for your reading pleasure! I'm posting while very, very tired, so if I've missed any tags, etc, my apologies, lovelies. As always, thank you to my wonderful beta/real-life moirail, ilex, and thanks to my awesome readers!

**Years in the Past**

 

**Helmsman: Pilot**

Your best friend is dead.

Your revolution has failed.

For all acts of courage, a price must be paid.

And now all you know is the boundless expanse of space and the mechanisms of your own mind-turned-machine because you are not a troll anymore, not really (you are better this way Her Imperial Majesty May She Ever Dwell In Glory was kind to improve you).

You know the pulse of the ship. You know the stars. You know code and cosmos. You know your Empress’s will.

And you must obey (want to obey freedom is nothing more than an illusion only through servitude can the lowblood masses find peace glory unto the Empire and unto Her Imperious Condescension).

Her will is that you bring her to a new home.

So that is exactly what you do.

**Still Years in the Past (But Not Many)**

**Roxy: Be Ten**

You wake up in the recovery room drowsy and sluggish with your head pounding after another round of injections. Your last memory before passing out is of vomiting on the doctor’s shoes. You allow yourself a tired, private smile over that.

You catch a glimpse of yourself in the one-way mirror on the wall. Your coloring is all wrong, your veins brightly visible under your skin and a vivid shade of pink. Even your eyes have a pink cast to them.

You turn away from your reflection, shuddering.

Instead, you look at the boy in the cot on your left.

He’s lying so still you’d think he was sleeping if his eyes weren’t open. For a horrible moment, you think he’s dead, but then you notice the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

You’ve seen him around the labs before. You think he’s been here even longer than you have, and you’ve been here as long as you can remember. You’ve never heard him talk. You sort of wonder if he can.

You know he invents things, and you know he can fight. The other kids tell stories about him, one of the tales going so far as to say he managed to construct a functional sword out of folded bits of aluminum salvaged from your cheap meal trays, and that he seriously injured a few of the guards with it.

Maybe that’s the reason they keep him in solitary confinement most of the time.

“You must be really bored if you’re that intent on staring at me,” he says, and you jump. You guess that answers the question of whether or not he can talk.

“Oh. Sorry.”

He shrugs, not moving his eyes from the ceiling.

You return your attention to your reflection. You can almost bear it if you imagine that the bright pink lines all over you are actually just scribbles on the mirror rather than lines of chemical-god-only-knows-what under your skin.

“Three days,” the boy says suddenly.

You turn back to look at him, blinking.

“Huh?”

He gestures at you, still without looking at you.

“Your veins. They’ll go back to normal in about three days.”

You stare at him.

“How did you know I was—”

“There’s a mirror in here, and it’s a perfectly natural human impulse to want to look at oneself, especially after some sort of physical trauma has occurred. It’s a means of assessing damage. That taken into consideration, I assumed you would be concerned by your appearance. Was I wrong?”

That is a whole hell of a lot of words for a kid your age to drone out about natural human impulses. He talks more like a robot than a person. You guess you’d have some quirks, too, if you spent most of your time isolated in a six-by-eight foot cell.

You hold your hands up in front of your face, inspecting the delicate pink webbing running under the skin.

“I’m just going to pretend they’re pink tiger stripes,” you decide.

A faint frown tugs at the corners of his mouth.

“But they’re the wrong pattern to be tiger stripes,” he says

For some reason that absolutely cracks you up.

“That wasn’t intended to be funny,” he says over your cackling, sounding vaguely distressed.

You wipe laughter-tears from your eyes and roll onto your side, grinning at him.

“I know,” you say. “That just made it funnier.”

He’s finally looking at you, at least. His eyes are orange. You doubt they’ve always been that color. You snort at the look of incomprehension on his face.

“I know, I know. Does not compute, right?”

The frown on his face deepens, and his eyes skitter away. You might have actually hurt his feelings. Oops.

“I’m not very good at jokes,” he mumbles.

You chew your lip.

“Sorry,” you say. “I was just teasing. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

He blinks at you, like he’s not used to being apologized to.

“Is there truly any such thing as saying something without meaning _anything_ by it?”

That sounded way too much like philosophy, and you just cannot even deal. You purse your lips.

“Your I.Q. is something stupid-high, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

No arrogance. You think his deadpan came to life and ate it before moving on to his sense of humor.

You lever yourself up on your elbow.

“So,” you say, wiggling your eyebrows at him. “Come here often?”

Nothing. Not even a chuckle.

“Is that another joke?”

“Jeez. You’re hopeless.”

“I know.”

You gape.

“And _sad_.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

Wait. Wait. Was that sarcasm?

“Was that sarcasm?”

He shifts his eyes from left to right.

“Maybe.”

You beam.

“There may be hope for you yet, grasshopper.”

His lips quiver into the shyest, most painfully tentative smile you’ve ever seen. You hold out your hand to him, smiling back.

“I’m Roxy.

“Dirk.”

You shake on it.

**Dirk: Choose**

Your third day in the Victor’s Village, you sit in the courtyard, surrounded by sunlight and every beautiful, blooming thing in nature, and you try to run the probability of Roxy’s survival if you killed yourself.

You rationalize that she doesn’t need you for physical protection. She proved that in the Games. You doubt she needs you for emotional support. Time and time again, she’s shown that she’s more resilient than you are.

But she can’t protect herself from herself.

She’s been fall-down drunk practically from the moment the guards escorted the two of you to your suite in the Victor’s Village. You’re afraid that if you do kill yourself, she’ll just stay drunk until either her liver gives out or she takes a bad fall and snaps her neck.

You push your shades up and rub at your eyes, and you see Jane with a spear sticking out of her chest burned on the insides of your eyelids.

And that is the precise moment when some jackass decides to tap you on the shoulder.

You whip around and aim a punch. A sturdy hand catches your fist, and someone gives a nervous chuckle.

“Steady on, chum.”

You realize your breathing has turned frantic and your pulse has spiked. You ease out of your fighting stance and stop seeing enemies everywhere.

And then you realize who you’re looking at.

Jake bloody fucking English, winner of the human session two years ago and media darling, repeatedly voted into the top ten of Alterniearth’s Most Beloved Celebrities, which is one hell of a feat for a human.

You might be a little besotted with Jake bloody fucking English.

And he’s smiling at you.

Admittedly, it’s a worried kind of smile.

“—should see a doctor? Chum? Oh heavens to Betsy, please be alright…”

“What?” you ask, shaking yourself.

Jake presses a hand against his chest and breathes a sigh of relief.

“Phew. You gave me quite a fright. Do you feel well?”

You’re glad your shades obscure your eyes from view, because you’re pretty sure he’d find your stare off-putting.

“Uh. Yeah. I’m fine. Just not sleeping a whole lot.”

Jake claps a friendly (and freakishly strong) hand on your shoulder, sitting you back down on your bench and parking himself beside you.

“Well, lord knows we’ve all been there.”

You swallow, nod. You don’t know what to say. Even with Roxy’s coaching ( _and Jane’s, sweet, snarky, wonderful Jane, who is dead, who is dead because you were stupid and too slow_ ), you’re still lousy at communicating.

Jake pats your knee.

“Not much of a talker, eh?”

You shake your head. Jake chuckles.

“Well, I’ve heard it said that I can talk enough for two people, so I reckon we ought to get along swimmingly!”

You don’t understand why anyone would want to be your friend. You don’t understand why Roxy wanted to, or why Jane wanted to. You don’t understand why Jake English would want to.

You try to vocalize that, but all that comes out is, “Why are you talking to me?”

Oh, well done, Dirk. There you go with your famous tact.

Jake looks totally unfazed.

“Well, to be honest, you just looked like you needed someone to talk to.”

You gnaw the raw place on the inside of your cheek. It bleeds easily, since you keep chewing on it. You taste copper. You are not going to fucking cry. That is not a thing you are about to do.

But you sort of want to.

You open your mouth, then close it when you feel the pathetic noise welling up in your throat. You’re not letting that out. Fuck no.

To your horror, you instead blurt out, “I wish I was dead.”

The words are monotonous. No wobble. No panic. You sound like a robot.

Jake just looks at you and nods, like this isn’t surprising to him. You guess maybe it’s a common sentiment in the Victor’s Village. He sets a steady hand on your back.

“I hope you won’t find it terribly inconvenient if I insist on staying with you until that passes,” he says.

You huff a short laugh. It’s bitter.

“You’ll have to stick around for a while,” you say. “It’s not going anywhere.”

Jake smiles a sheepish, buck-toothed smile.

“I don’t mind.”

*

In sum, you fall in statistically improbable depths of love with Jake bloody fucking English.

*

He really does talk a lot. Much of it is mindless blathering, and in a strange way, that soothes you.

But some of it is less mindless. Some of it is talk that makes you anxious, makes you look around in paranoia, fearful that the wrong person might be listening.

He tells you about his grandmother, who was his sole guardian until she was executed for treason.

“It was a whole great courtroom debacle,” Jake says. “Much hoopla and hullabaloo made about conspiracy to sabotage the Imperial order, you know how lawyers love to sound dramatic, of course. We thought she’d wriggled out of the charges first time around, but then they retried, and, well…I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t remember much from that time.”

You don’t really know how to react, so you ask, “Was she actually involved in a conspiracy plot?”

Jake chuckles.

“Oh, yes. She never did much care for the Empress.”

You raise your eyebrows and digest that particular factoid for a few weeks.

And just when you’re coming to terms with the fact that a little old lady tried to orchestrate the downfall of the Empire, Jake drops another bombshell on you.

“I’m part of a group, you see,” he says one day over breakfast. You’d mostly tuned out the rest of what he’d been saying, because you space out sometimes and generally, Jake doesn’t seem to mind. But you tune back in to hear him say that.

“What group?” you ask, almost bored. You assume it’s some celebrity club or sporting group. Those sound like typical Jake things.

The pause worries you. Jake can go on and on without pausing a beat, so much so that you think he must have worked out a way to draw breath while in the midst of speech. The boy doesn’t pause. Not unless he’s actually taking two seconds to think for a change.

“Jake,” you say, your voice gone stern. “What group?”

Jake chews his bottom lip with one of his (adorable, dorky, harmless) buckteeth.

“Well…how much do you know about Alternian history, chum?”

“Not much. Should I care?”

“Ah,” Jake says, nodding sagely. “Then I take it you’ve never heard of the Signless?”

“The what?”

“More of a who than a what, chum,” Jake says. “Though some insist that he never really existed and it’s just a pretty story.”

You sigh.

“There’s a story.”

“Of course!”

“And you’re going to tell it to me, aren’t you?”

Again, Jake says, “Of course!”

He tells you.

You listen.

And against your more rational impulses, you are moved.

“There are still people out there who believe his teachings, is the best thing,” Jake says. “Now, there’s a fair amount of debate from organization to organization about the relevance of nonviolence if we ever want to actually achieve anything—”

“We?” you repeat. “Jesus, Jake. Don’t tell me.”

“That’s just it, though chum!” Jake says, his eyes bright behind his glasses. “This is the group I’m a part of! Lots of humans have started getting involved, if only for the sake of criticizing the way the Condesce runs things.”

You push your shades up to pinch the bridge of your nose.

“You’re not telling me this.”

“But I am! And gosh darn if it isn’t a thrill, letting you in on my little secret!”

You reach across the table and catch his wrists, which takes him by surprise. You’re not usually the one to initiate physical contact.

“And what if I wasn’t trustworthy?” you demand.

Jake looks perplexed.

“But you are.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

Jake gives you a dazzling smile.

“I just know.”

You make a frustrated sound, let go of his wrists to pace the room.

“No. Okay, no. Fuck. _Fuck_. You’ve told me. It’s done. So just—just—nobody else, okay? Promise me you won’t tell anyone else.”

“Shucks, Dirk, are you worried about me?” Jake asks, all genuine concern. He stands up and puts his hands on your arms, bracing you. “It’s alright. I swear to you, I’m careful. I just happen to trust you, is all.”

You clench your jaw to distract yourself from the tightening in your throat.

“Have you ever met anyone you _didn’t_ trust, Jake?”

Jake chuckles.

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t trust the Condesce.”

You aim a light punch at his ribs.

“That’s not funny.”

“You don’t think anything is funny, old chap.”

“Yes, and you think that _everything_ is funny,” you snap. “Life is just one jolly skip through Cheerful Land, where no one’s out to hurt you and everyone is basically good and everything is just a damn _lark_.”

You regret the words as soon as they leave your mouth. Jake’s face is, for once, unsmiling, his eyes pinched at the corners.

“I suppose I do make light of rather a lot,” he says at last.

“Jake—”

“But please believe me when I say that I take this work very, very seriously.”

You’re barely breathing. You lean your forehead against his and try to remember how.

“If she was willing to publicly execute this Signless guy just for having ideas,” you say, “what would she do to you and your little group for having ideas and a general disregard for nonviolence?”

Jake loops his arms around your waist, kissing the side of your mouth.

“All of us have thought that through,” he says. “I’m not _quite_ as brainless as I seem, you know.”

You swallow back all the gnawing fear and doubt and attempt this human emotion called trust.

“Not quite, I guess, but pretty close.”

You get smacked on the ass for your snark. You’re more pleased by that than you’d like to admit.

“Some people, Dirk Strider, might accuse you of being mean.”

“Are you one of those people?”

Jake makes a pouty face. He has a great pouty face.

“Yes.”

You kiss him to hide your smile.

“I'm sorry you have such a mean boyfriend,” you tell him after you draw back.

Jake’s grin turns sly.

“Well,” he says after a moment. “I can think of a few ways he might make it up to me.”

And you breathe, because things are normal again, normal and safe and domestic, and there is no more talk of revolution for that day.

*

The summons to the Imperial Palace takes you by surprise, to say the least.

Standing in front of the Empress makes you feel impossibly small.

The first thing she says to you is, “I hear you’s shacked up with Jake English.”

You stare.

“Uh. Yeah. That would be correct, Your Condescension. I guess. Is this a social call to discuss my love life?”

The Condesce smiles, all sweet, poisoned honey.

“In a manner a speakin’,” she drawls. “I got a favor I needs from you.”

You were already wary. Now you’re wary squared.

“And that favor would be…?”

“Oh, not much,” the Condesce says, “I just need your little matesprit’s head on a platter, metaphorically speakin’.”

You’re glad for your shades, because your eyes must be very wide.

“What?”

The Condesce grins. It’s not a nice grin. There are way too many sharp teeth involved.

“Don’t play dumb, Dirky. Don’t suit you. I know your boyfrond’s told you all ‘bout his extracurriculars, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

You feel the blood leave your face.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you say, trying to inject honest confusion into your voice. You’re a terrible actor. But you have to try.

The Condesce takes a step toward you. You got a growth spurt last year that put you over six feet tall, but the Condesce is still taller than you, especially if you count her ridiculously long, curved horns. You hold your ground, unwilling to let her see that you’re intimidated.

“I think you do, though, chickadee,” she says. “An’ I got ways a findin’ out if you be lyin’ to me. You wanna try those out, or you wanna skip the electroshocks and tell me the truth right now?”

You are not afraid of pain. You survived enough of it in your formative years to leave you almost numb to it. You push your luck.

“Maybe I want to take a tour of your super-not-so-secret torture chamber. You know, see if it’s really up to scratch.”

The Condesce sighs, shaking her head.

“Boy, why you gotta fight me on everyfin? I already know Jake’s all tangled up with that cultist bullshit. An’ I’m shore he’s told you aboat it, ‘cause that boy can’t shut his mouth ‘bout nothin.’ So let’s skip the back-and-forth about what we say we do and don’t know about Jake’s part-time seditious fuckery, hmm?”

Your mouth is dry, so your words come out sounding thick and strange.

“What is it you want from me?”

The Condesce taps your chest with a claw.

“There’s my problem-solver,” she says, oozing false fondness. “I want you to get him to confess.”

Your heart hammers in your chest, crashing against your ribs like it might escape your body this way.

“No,” you blurt out.

In your limited experience dealing with the Condesce in person, she’s always been smiling, or at least smirking. But there’s no trace of humor in her face as she looks at you, her eyes keen.

“You get his confishion,” she says, “or I have lil’ Miss Lalonde marched out in front of the firing squad.”

You can hear your pulse in your ears. You wonder if she can hear it, too.

“Why do you even need me?” you ask. Your throat is so dry that your voice comes out as if strained through sand. “I thought you could have people locked up just on circumstantial evidence for this sort of thing.”

You don’t know how you can put thoughts like that together at the moment. The Condesce clicks her tongue in annoyance.

“Please, you think I’m some kinda moray-on? You don’t just go lockin’ up a celebrity like Jake English without plenty a motherglubbin’ finsurance. Public’d go shithive maggots if I didn’t show he was a traitor plain as day.”

You curl your fingers into fists.

“I can’t—”

“Shore you can,” she says. “You’ll wear a wire, and then you just gotta get him talkin’ away. Boy loves to talk.”

You shake your head, staring at the floor. This isn’t real. You’re having a nightmare. Any second now you’re going to wake up in your bed, and Jake is going to be there, or Roxy, or both of them, and both of them will tell you it’s okay.

“Or,” the Condesce goes on, “you can refuse to help me and send Roxy to her death. The public might think you two are eel cute an’ all, but you ain’t no Jake English. If I cull your gillfrond, they’ll get over it.”

You squeeze your eyes shut. She’s right. You know she’s right.

She leans close enough that you can feel her breath on your face.

“So who you gonna choose, Dirk? Your moirail, or your matesprit?”

*

You choose.

*

You’re in the Victor’s Village courtyard again, sitting one the very same bench where you met Jake for the first time.

It’s not hard, getting him to talk. All you have to do is ask, and he tells you, in painful, damning detail. Because he thought he could trust you. Because he would never even think twice about it.

You’d call him stupid if you didn’t love him so much.

You wonder if, when you take his hand and hold on hard, he realizes.

The Imperial soldiers show up within minutes.

A broad-chested blueblood wearing a Captain’s insignia on his uniform pushes forward.

“Jake English?”

Jake gives the soldiers an amiable smile, as if they’re just here to say hello rather than to arrest him.

“That’s me, chum. Lovely day, isn’t it?”

You make a horrible, strangled sound. You think it was meant to be a laugh, but it got lost somewhere on the way out of your throat and turned into little more than a gurgle.

The blueblood lifts his chin.

“On your feet.”

You can’t let go of Jake’s hand, even as he rises from the bench. Everything seems slowed.

“Jake,” you say. There’s something wrong with your voice. “No. No. Jake, no.”

Jake squeezes your hand, then untangles his fingers from yours, squaring his shoulders.

The other soldiers fan out around the blueblood, surrounding the bench, cutting off any escape routes.

“Jake English,” the Captain says, “You are under arrest for high treason, conspiracy, intent to incite a riot…”

One of the soldiers produces a pair of handcuffs and moves toward Jake, who doesn’t even try to run, who doesn’t even look afraid.

It hits you in that moment that you will never see him again.

You lurch to your feet and try to attack the guards before you can even think about it. But there are more of them than there are of you, and you’re unarmed. You get punched in the face and pinned to the ground for your trouble. Your shades crack and go skittering a few feet down the path.

Someone is yelling a lot of incoherent nonsense.

Belatedly, you realize it’s you.

“Dirk.”

Jake is looking at you. And you stop yelling.

You will never see him again. This is the last moment you have with him.

You force yourself to meet his eyes, and for once you do not guard your face. You let him see your hurt and your fear and your shame and your love, and it will not be enough, it will never be enough, but it is the very least you can think to give him.

“I’m sorry,” you say, your voice hardly even a whisper.

His eyes are so sad when he looks at you, but he smiles.

“It’s alright, chum.”

And then he drives his elbow back into the sternum of the soldier trying to cuff him and there’s a blur of movement and you see what he’s going to do seconds before he does it, see him wrestle the pistol out of the wheezing soldier’s holster and raise it to his temple.

The scream doesn’t have a chance to leave your mouth before it’s interrupted by the sound of the gunshot.

 

**Roxy: Act In Desperation**

You’re sweaty with terror and breathing in ragged, sharp gasps. You took as much painkiller as you could without it killing you. All the tools you’ll need are laid in tidy rows on a tray, Dirk’s laptop open to a swiftly-buffering medical video. There’s a tarp laid over your kitchen table and more tarps on the floor. Dave and Rose are safely stashed with Mr. Egbert.

“Are you sure?” Dirk asks for what must be the hundredth time.

You grip his arms, pink-polished nails digging crescents into his skin.

“She will _never_ use me as an incubator again,” you hiss, and you sound absolutely mad, as much an animal as the feral trolls you saw in the labs as a child, each of them dragged screaming to the dissection table.

Dirk presses his forehead to yours.

“Just…just tell me one more time: are you sure?”

You hold out a scalpel to him.

“Do it.”

**Dad: Implement the Plan, Stage One**

You stand, calm and patient, as the Imperial lab technicians boggle at the four infants in front of them and share murmured whispers of awe at the improbable manipulation of their gene sequences. At the possibility for _potential_. These children could be super-soldiers, they mutter.

“That was the point,” Dirk pipes up.

From her vantage point in the head lab technician’s swivel-chair, the Condesce asks, “So, these super-kids be for eel?”

“By all our accounts…yes, Your Condescension,” says the head tech, with no small amount of disbelief. “Our understanding of the finer points of human brains and genetic structures is still somewhat limited, but these children already display immense potential for feats thus far unheard of. I’ve never seen a human manifest signs of telekinetic ability, and yet—”

“Spare me the chitter-chatter, doc,” the Condesce says, rising. She stands up and crosses the laboratory, staring your small party down.

“Y’all say you spliced ‘em with some kinda magical finetic code, or somefin. I want it.”

“No can do,” Roxy says brightly. “But we can do you one better.”

The Condesce arches an eyebrow, arms folded. It’s time for you to take over.

“Under a very specific set of parameters,” you say, “we are willing to train these children and their abilities to their fullest potential, and, when they are of an appropriate age, surrender them to you for the purposes of strengthening your army.”

The Condesce eyes the children. Then she eyes the lengthy sheet of notes in the nearest lab tech’s hands.

“Just how much firepower we talkin’ here?”

You smile, tight and tense, not that any of these people will be the wiser to your displeasure.

“I assure you, they will grow to outmatch each and every one of your Generals. These are four individuals you very much want on your side.”

The Condesce’s eyes flash. She plays at vapid with her glitter and gutter-speak, but no one lasts as long as an Empress as she has by being stupid. However subtle, your threat doesn’t get past her. It wasn’t intended to.

“You say you’s got conditions.” she says at last. “Best name ‘em quick beshore I get bored.”

You give her a curt nod.

“They will remain under our care as they grow. You will leave their emotional development in our hands. They are not to be treated as laboratory specimens. Routine checkups and non-invasive testing is permissible, but only under our supervision. Are we clear so far?”

“Yeah, we good so far. Anyfin else?”

“Yes,” says Dirk.

The Condesce sighs.

“A’ight. What is it?”

Roxy steps forward, chin raised. You think it’s good to see a little defiance in her again; she’d been so traumatized after the birth, poor child, too young and unwilling. Dirk is still closed off, still drawn into his own head, but at least he’s here with you, not lying unmoving and listless in the dark of his bedroom. He reaches for Roxy’s hand, squeezes it.

It’s enough to embolden her to speak.

“We want you to end the human Games.”

 

**Damara: Understand**

You are treading a knife’s edge, and your feet are so cut and bloody that you’re sure you’re going to slip off.

The Games have turned you inside-out. You don’t know who you are anymore. You don’t know what’s real and what’s not.

You think, desperately, at least you still have Rufioh.

And then.

And then.

And then you see him.

With that Zahhak boy from District One.

Holding hands. Kissing.

There’s nothing pale in their fervor. There’s nothing black in their tenderness.

He has abandoned you.

You are

absolutely




You plummet.

And you see yourself, as if from far away, walking up to the two boys and speaking, so calm, in your broken sentences, through the accent that almost no one can parse.

You tell Rufioh that he is dead.

He looks at you, shocked and guilty and confused and just a very little bit scared.

“I—look, doll, I’m—I’m so sorry, I just—I know there’s no excuse and all, but what do you mean—”

You stick him in the throat with your knife, and then you keep sticking him, tearing holes in his body long after he’s dead, and when the other boy tries to pull you away, you stick him, too, three in the chest, one through the eye and into the brain, and you are drenched in their colors and you feel—

Two dead boys at your feet, and you are not even a little sad. They were going to die anyway. They were already dead.

And you understand.

You are all dead, every last one of you. You are dead from the moment you’re hatched into the world. And you breathe and you sleep and you eat and you revel and you fuck, all distractions, all time-wasters as the clock tick

tick

ticks down to the inevitable moment you stop breathing.

You hunch over the bodies and begin to laugh.

 

**Porrim: Conspire**

You wonder what in the hell you’re doing. You could lose your job for this. You could potentially lose your freedom for this. Maybe even your life.

But if you don’t do this, Kankri will most certainly lose _his_ life.

So you wait in the darkened wing on the side of the television studio and take him aside after his interview with Aranea.

“Well done.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I sounded like a fool.”

You smile at him.

“Is that any different from usual?”

His little mouth pulls down in a scowl, charmingly different from his normal neutrality or bratty huffiness.

“You are no help whatsoever,” he grumbles.

You take his wrist and pull him further back into the shadows. Then you press a small parcel into his hand.

“What—”

“Shh.”

You lean in and speak against his ear.

“It’s a specially formulated dye. Ask for privacy tomorrow at the labs and mix the packet in with your genetic material. It should muddy the color until it appears rust.”

He stares at you for a moment, nearly as vulnerable as he’d been when you discovered his mutation. Then his head falls against your shoulder. You pat his back.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

You feel warm little flutters in your chest as you lay a hand over the back of his head.

“It’s going to be alright. You’re going to be just fine.”

“You have no way of knowing that.”

“Shh.”

You are risking your career and quite possibly your life for a boy you hardly know. An _irritating_ boy you hardly know, at that. But something about him pulls at you, some indefinable magnetism in his character that you doubt he’s even aware of.

“Thank you,” he says again, so soft it might as well be a prayer.

 

**Kankri: Play the Game**

More than anything else, you’re tired. You’re hungry, yes, and thirsty, and frightened, but it’s the weariness, you think, that’s taking the worst toll on you. When you need it, your think pan will fire off a burst of adrenaline, but after that drains away, you feel delirious with exhaustion.

You think your sleep-deprived delirium must be spreading, because Mituna has clearly lost his mind.

At least Latula thinks so, too.

“Babe,” she says, pitching her voice low in a no-doubt vain attempt to keep the mics from picking it up. “That’s crazy-talk.”

The three of you are sitting in a little ring with your heads bent together, Mituna and Latula painfully close while you kneel opposite their cozy cuddling. You’ve played third wheel so far for the duration of the Games. Not so different from your life before you were called at the lottery.

“Not if it works,” Mituna insists, his teeth mangling the syllables. His eyes are too bright, lit with the sort of intensity that only comes from desperation.

He’d scratched the idea into the dirt, hidden from the cameras by your leaning bodies, too cautious to voice it aloud (and rightly so) for fear of instant destruction.

So you are currently staring down at a hastily scrawled and thoroughly insane plan written in the dirt by your knees.

It reads:

_take chip out of my brain_

_get psionics back_

_break arena barrier_

_run_

You erase the words with the palm of your hand, scrubbing the dirt smooth again, your bloodpusher beating so fast you think it might burst.

“Latula is right,” you say. “It’s complete lunacy.”

“You might die,” Latula adds, her face pale.

“We’re all going to die anyway,” Mituna snarls. “The least we can do is give it a shot.”

You can’t stand the look of anguish on Latula’s face.

“And how do you even propose we go about…”

You make vague gestures with your hands, unwilling to voice any part of this madness aloud.

Mituna looks at you. The fading light throws strange shadows along the angles of his bony face. The effect is profoundly disturbing.

“Get something sharp,” he says, “and stick it in my head.”

*

Things go awry. Just not quite in the way you expect.

Contrary to your fears, the Games personnel don’t have you all instantly terminated once you can no longer hide what you’re doing, and Latula even manages to cut the chip out of Mituna’s brain without killing him.

But something else gets cut away, too.

When he regains consciousness, his words come out garbled, like he can’t find the right ones. His sense of balance is wrecked. He gets flustered twice as easily as he used to, flying into sporadic and intense emotional outbursts at the slightest provocation. He apologizes constantly.

And, to your shame, you don’t tell him not to apologize, because you resent him for every second that he detracts from your ability to survive.

As it turns out, the worst part of the Games isn’t the exhaustion. The worst part is being stripped of every pretense, every boast, every delusion you’ve ever had about yourself. The worst part is having to stare down the ugliness of your own hypocrisy.

The _other_ worst part is the double-dose of guilt you get to eat when the boy you so resented dies to save your life.

*

As traumatic events often transpire, it happens quickly and ends in bloodshed.

One moment, you’re trudging along with Mituna supported between yourself and Latula. The next, the sound of gunfire explodes all around you, and Latula yells, “Down!” and you hit the ground hard, arms over your head.

You’re going to die. You’re very, very certain in that moment that you’re going to die.

There’s a ground-shaking _boom_ , and a gale of pure _force_ rushing over you, a shockwave, and suddenly the air is crackling with electricity. You chance a look up.

The first thing you think, as you see Mituna standing over you and Latula, is that he’s burning.

The only experience you’ve ever had with his psionics was the time he shocked you when you were both four and you were arguing, and he’d apologized immediately and never did it again.

One little shock. That’s all you ever saw.

You didn’t know he was capable of…this.

The power surges out of him in waves of red-blue-red-blue, splintering bullets and snapping trees and flinging the electrocuted corpses of the attackers flying out of sight, and it doesn’t stop. He’s pushing it, tendrils of red-blue lightning snapping up toward the canopy, burning through leaves, searching for the barrier, oh god, he’s trying to break it, he’s trying to break it now and you’re not ready you have no plan you have nowhere to run if he doesn’t get you killed, you—

He falls.

The rush of power ends as abruptly as it began.

Little flecks of ash and burning leaves drift down into the devastated clearing. Your ears ring, and everything is so still and quiet. Almost peaceful.

When your hearing returns, you hear Latula sobbing.

“—at me, babe, please, ‘Tuna, c’mon baby, look at me, _look at me_ —”

Dazed, you crawl to the place where Mituna lies shuddering. Latula is holding his head, and she looks terrified. You’ve never seen her look terrified. Not like this.

You finally turn your gaze to Mituna.

Blood pours from his nose, his eyes, his mouth. He’s choking on it, coughing up bubbles of yellow-tinged spittle. His eyes won’t stay focused.

He’s dying.

You realize this in the most detached, clinical section of your mind. But the part of you that feels, the part of you that’s here, that’s scraped raw and bleeding, tells you that you can still save him, you can make him be okay somehow, you can keep him alive and help him get better and never, _never_ have to see Latula cry again.

He’s trying to say something, lips shaping words without sound. You lean closer, hear the labored, rattling draw of his breath.

“I’m sorry,” he manages. “I couldn’t—couldn’t do it—sorry…”

“Shhh,” Latula whispers, trying to wipe the blood off his face. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare be sorry. And don’t you die on me, boy. I love you. You don’t get to just quit on me.”

Mituna flashes her a mangled smile.

“Sorry.”

And that’s the end of it. You can tell the exact moment when the life goes out of him. You watch Latula shake him, snarl at him to come back, to wake up. You watch, and do nothing. You feel nothing.

Your hands feel strange. Like they’re not really yours, not really a part of you. Not real. These can’t be your hands. Just like the body in Latula’s arms can’t be Mituna. None of this is real.

The canon booms, and Latula screams.

*

She goes mad.

That’s all you can think, really, when she drives her sabre into the next three tributes you come across.

There aren’t many of you left. You and Latula, and, after she kills another tribute, three others.

Even still, you don’t think for a moment that she’ll turn on you. She’s Latula. Loyal and brave and protective.

She wouldn’t turn on you.

She wouldn’t.

After she rips her sword free of the fourth kill, she stands motionless and draws in quiet, shuddering breaths.

“I need to be alone,” she says suddenly, and you startle.

“W-what?”

“I want to go where Mituna died. And I want to be alone. So stay here. I’ll come back for you later.”

You haven’t been alone since you entered the Games, clinging to Mituna and Latula from the moment the starting gun sounded. You’d believed you would all protect each other.

So far, you have protected no one.

“Don’t leave me here,” you beg. You know you sound like a wiggler. You can’t help it. “Latula. Latula, please don’t go off by yourself. Think rationally for just a moment –”

“Mituna’s dead,” she says, her voice flat. “I don’t want to think rationally. I don’t care. I just don’t. I need to be by myself for a little bit.”

You do what you’ve never dared to do before and reach out to touch her, curling your fingers around hers in an attempt to get her to stay.

She rips her hand away not even a second later.

“Let me alone, Kankri, or I swear I’ll run you through!”                     

You flinch back, stung.

“Just—just stay here,” she snaps, marching off through the woods.

Your throat is too tight to call after her.

You sit down on a rock and tell yourself not to cry.

Half an hour passes with you sitting by yourself, waiting for Latula to come back.

And that’s when the hunting party finds you.

 

**Dirk: Be Prepared**

They come out of the Games wrecked, every last one of them (every last one of _you_ , you’re a Victor, too, even though you do your best to forget this fact).

You haven’t been a handler very long, and you’ve never actually had a charge from your assigned district survive until now. But you’ve been a Victor yourself. You’ve known plenty of other Victors. You don’t think it’ll be that difficult to deal with. Nothing you haven’t seen before. You’re prepared for this.

You’re sent to the private hospital where they’re keeping your tribute. The minute you get there, you’re informed that they’re having a good deal of trouble keeping him alive.

As it turns out, a mutant who suffers massive blood loss isn’t a great candidate for a transfusion, seeing as no blood in any blood bank—or on the hemospectrum, for that matter—matches the mutation.

When they finally manage to stabilize him, they let you into the room. You don’t particularly want to go in; it reminds you too much of the Imperial labs, of the rooms you were shuffled through as a kid, and it smells just the same, like sterilizer and blood and fear-sweat. All you can see from your position just inside the door is a mass of tubes and machinery.

It takes you a long time to go anywhere near the hospital bed.

When you do, you think, _There is no way this kid is going to survive_.

It’s much worse up close and in reality than it looked on television. You watched the Games footage. You saw what happened to him. But it was just movie-gore when viewed through a screen.

In person, it’s gruesome. He’s all puncture wounds and stitches and bubbly patches of tissue where he had to have skin grafts over his burns. Looking at his wrists makes you feel a little queasy (the doctors explain they had to operate to restore any chance of mobility to one of his hands, severed nerves, severed tendons) because the thought of that sort of damage to your arms (your weapons) disturbs the hell out of you.

You stare down at the letters the girl sliced into his chest. They’ll scar. He’ll wear the word “mutant” like a warped sort of nametag for the rest of his life.

However short that may be.

You wait around like you’re supposed to while he circles the drain.

But he surprises you by not dying.

And you find yourself sort of impressed and also sort of sad, because it might have been better for him to just slip away in his coma.

You watch him regain consciousness and reassure yourself that you’ve got this, that you can deal with however he might react to the understanding that the Games are over and he’s still alive. Every Victor deals with that revelation differently. Roxy cried. You stared at the ceiling. Damara laughed.

Kankri opens his eyes, and you know the look in them, the vacancy, the sense that he is very much somewhere else in his head.

You make the mistake of touching his shoulder.

Nothing in your experience has prepared you for the way he screams.

 

**Kankri: Adapt**

After everything is finished, you think you will be culled the moment you wake up in the hospital outside the Games arena.

In a way, you are horrified to be wrong.

Reporters follow you everywhere. You see your wide-eyed face on the cover of every newspaper, every television broadcast, splashed across banners and posters and pamphlets. The media crowds you, asking for interviews. The public crowds you asking for autographs, hundreds of hands reaching out to touch you, pull at you.

For the first four days out of the hospital, you don’t sleep.

On day five, your handler talks you down off the roof. He tries to put a hand on your arm and you snarl at him, animal impulse taking you over. Mr. Strider removes withdraws his hand, and his face remains neutral. Calm. The antithesis of how you feel right now.

You run past him back into your apartment, ashamed, and hide in the kitchen cupboards until you fall asleep there.

You meet the royals a few days later at a private dinner party. Cronus seems especially interested in you, his gestures and expressions growing increasingly animated the longer you let him talk to you. It’s nice, having someone to talk to. _He’s_ nice. He’s a few sweeps older than you, eight to your six, and although he’s much taller than you, he hasn’t fully grown into his seadweller build just yet. He feels like a peer. Like he could be your friend. You need a friend.

He shows you around the Capitol, takes you to restaurants and to movies and to meet his friends. He reintroduces you to Aranea Serket, who’s twice as loquacious off the air as she is on it, and drags you clubbing with Porrim. You discover you have contacts in common; he befriended Damara after her victory in the Games the half-sweep before you, and he met Kurloz over Trollian. One morning over coffee, he confides in you that he’s trying to convince Kurloz to move to the Capitol once he’s old enough to do so next sweep.

“Guy’s got a wicked sick mind,” Cronus says. “But creative, y’know? He’d have a fantastic career as an arena designer. Gave me a great idea for a trap. I’m gonna see if I can convince the guys to use it for the next Games.”

It’s the first time you’ve felt truly uncomfortable in Cronus’s presence.

“I’m not sure he would want to leave his matesprit,” you say. “He’s very devoted to her.”

Cronus shrugs.

“If she ain’t too low on the hemospectrum, they might give her a pardon to move with him, seein’ as he’s a highblood, an’ all.”

You fiddle with your napkin, perturbed.

“And if something should go awry with their matespritship? Would she be permitted to remain in the Capitol?”

Cronus looks at you as if you’re a child who’s said something particularly stupid.

“Well, ‘course not. They’d just send her back to her district.”

At the look of distress on your face, he adds, “Ain’t like she’d be culled! She’d just have no place here anymore if she wasn’t with a highblood, get me? The Imperial City is for, y’know…elites.” Then he smiles at you, an indulgent sort of smile. “An’ Victors, obviously.”

For once in your life, you find yourself unable to say anything.

But then he stops talking about the Games and returns to being your smiling, shrugging friend.

Two weeks later, he catches you in the stairwell of the Victors’ Village and kisses you.

“Please,” he says when you turn your head away. “Please, Kan. I’m crazy about you, you got no idea…”

You duck your chin down to your chest when he tries to kiss you again.

“I don’t feel that way about you,” you tell him. “You’re my friend, Cronus, nothing more. Please don’t take it personally. I made a vow not to entangle myself in romantic affairs.”

He tries to kiss you one more time and you tell him you’re beginning to feel triggered. He lets you go, looking betrayed and disappointed as you flee to your apartment. You spend another night in the cupboards after that.

The summons comes the following week. Mr. Strider shows up at your apartment carrying a bag of new clothes, all of them variants of red and black. He picks an outfit for you and tells you to get dressed. Then he drives you out of the Imperial compound and to a hotel in the city. He procures a room key from the front desk and leads you into the glass elevators, silent.

He stops you in front of the room number that matches his key.

“Do you understand what’s going on?” he asks. You shake your head. He sighs.

“Jesus,” he says under his breath, and then, “How much do you know about the conditions of being a Victor?”

You look at him, lost.

“I can’t say I’ve found much information on the subject.”

He crouches down to your level. You find the gesture slightly patronizing. Then he takes off his sunglasses for the first time in your presence and you’re distracted by the odd hue of his irises, bright tangerine. You shudder all over wondering what they must have done to him to make his eyes that color.

“I don’t know how to beat around the bush, so I won’t,” he says. “People with enough money—and in this city, that’s everyone—can pay the Empress a fee to request your services for an allotted amount of time.”

“Services,” you repeat blankly.

“That can mean any number of things,” Mr. Strider says. “But it usually only means one.”

“I don’t understand,” you say, but the tremor in your hands says otherwise.

Mr. Strider sighs.

“God, you really are innocent. Or naïve. Or both.”

You bare you teeth at him.

“Is it your goal to be as insulting as possible, Mr. Strider? Do you make a habit of belittling your charges at every given opportunity? You say the word ‘innocent’ as if it is something I should feel shame for, and don’t even get me started on the loaded connotations of the word ‘naïve’—”

He stops you by taking your shoulders.

“They paid to fuck you.”

You go still in his grasp. You hate that he’s touching you, but at the same time, you’re quite certain it’s the only thing keeping you standing. You sway, lightheaded.

“They—I don’t—I—”

“This can go down one of two ways,” Mr. Strider tells you. “You can either fight the whole time and make it harder on yourself, or you can lay back and think of England, or whatever the hell place trolls think of. Make sense?”

You can’t breathe. The air gets stuck in your throat and won’t travel to your lungs. Mr. Strider lowers his voice.

“This is part of your life now, kid. Gotta adapt. I’m sorry.”

You find yourself clutching at his sleeve like you used to clutch at your lusus when you were frightened of noises in the night.

“Please—please don’t make me go in there, I can’t—I took a v-vow, I don’t want to—please, I don’t want to—”

“I know.”

You start hyperventilating. Mr. Strider swears under his breath and herds you a little ways down the hall. He pushes at you until you take the hint and sit down against the wall. He sits next to you.

“Look, let me level with you for a second here. I don’t know how to comfort people, okay? I know you’re freaked out, and really traumatized and stuff, but could you…maybe stop crying?”

“I’m—not crying,” you wheeze through your teeth. “Just—just having a—partial-symptom panic attack.”

Mr. Strider grimaces.

“Oh. Well. Could you…not be having that?”

He’s so utterly inept with your distress that you almost laugh. He might be as useless at reassuring others as you are. At least he’s honest about it, which is more than you can say for yourself. You put your face in your hand and let out a brief snort.

“You really are terrible at this.”

“Yup.”

You surprise yourself by reaching over to pat his knee.

“You’ll get better.”

“Are you comforting me about my inability to comfort people?”

You give another breathy laugh.

“Yes, Mr. Strider, I believe I am.”

He shakes his head.

“You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

“I know.”

He waits for you to breathe normally again, and he doesn’t try to touch you, which you appreciate.

“I don’t like doing this, you know,” he says abruptly. “Dragging you here and tossing you to…whoever these people are. My job’s supposed to be about protecting you.”

“And here I thought you were just a glorified jailer,” you say, a little sharper than you’d intended. He frowns.

“Fair enough, I guess. But I _am_ supposed to protect you. And I can’t do that here.”

You swallow, little tremors running down from the top of your spine and into your limbs. You close your eyes.

“Then I’ll protect myself.”

Mr. Strider helps you to your feet and pats your back.

“Whatever you need to do to get through it.”

You nod, letting him lead you back to the door.

“It won’t be so bad,” he murmurs. “You’ve been through worse. You can get through this.”

You nod again. Even still, when the door opens, he has to pry your fingers off his sleeve.

He was right about one thing: you have been through worse. Which is exactly why you panic midway through and try to bolt.

Things get blurry after that.

The clients leave after a few hours. You get dressed, hiding bruised arms and thighs, and you very deliberately do not think.

Mr. Strider takes you home without saying anything. He sleeps on your couch that night. You toss in the sopor, feigning sleep when he peers into your room every couple of hours.

A few days later, Cronus pays you a visit. He takes one look at your shaking hands and the dark circles under your eyes and puts his arms around you. You allow yourself a brief moment of weakness and sniffle into his shirt.

“Hey, that’s okay, chief,” he says. “Just cry it out. I’m here for you.”

You sob into his chest, your scream muffled in the space between his ribs. He rocks you and talks nonsense until you’re calm.

“You wanna get out of here? Just get a little change of scenery?”

You nod.

Cronus takes you back to his apartment at the heart of the Imperial compound. You’re too upset to be properly awed by it, but it _is_ quite the nice space. He leads you over to the white leather couch and sits you down on it. You don’t even voice your opposition to his choice in furniture made from animal skins.

He sits beside you, a little close, but you suppose he’s trying to comfort you with proximity. You tell yourself to breathe.

“Wanna tell me what’s the matter?”

You ball your hands into fists around the fabric of your slacks, pulling them tight over your knees. You don’t have any words.

“S’okay,” Cronus says. “Think I can guess.”

You swallow.

“No one warned me. No one—no one told me I would have to—”

He puts his hand on your arm and you wince.

“Shit,” he mutters. “You hurt? Let me see.”

You shake your head, folding your arms around yourself. But Cronus persists, and finally he coaxes you out of your sweater. You sit still while he looks you over, his face twisted up with pity.

He touches your bruised arms and you just sit there and shake and feel useless.

“Aw, Kan,” he whispers. “Jesus, you poor thing, look what they did to you…shh, shh, it’s okay, you ain’t got anythin’ to be scared of, I ain’t gonna hurt you…”

His hands stroke up and down your back, your sides, fingers skimming over bruises and bite marks. It feels…almost nice, you suppose. He’s trying to comfort you the only way he knows how. You don’t want to alienate him by pushing him away.

He pulls you closer to him and kisses your neck, making you jerk back.

“What are you doing?”

“Alright, alright, I’m sorry, okay? Shh, just settle down, I ain’t gonna do it again.”

True to his word, he doesn’t, though he keeps an arm around you.

“Listen,” he says after a while. “I got an idea. An’ I know you won’t like it, but hear me out, okay?”

“Alright.”

Cronus turns to look at you, his face open, vulnerable.

“Be my matesprit,” he says, and then, when you start to object, he goes on with, “just for show. We don’t gotta do stuff behind closed doors. It’d just be to get the public off your back a little. Less people would prob’ly get permission to bang you if you were, you know…mine.”

“I’m not _yours_ ,” you say tartly. “This whole proposal makes me feel like a piece of meat to be fought over by rabid barkbeasts.”

The look he gives you is gentle, if not slightly demeaning.

“Darlin’,” he drawls. “That’s exactly what you are to them.”

You feel so tired, so heavy all over. You know he’s right.

“Whaddya say, chief? Come on, it wouldn’t be bad! We’d have fun!”

You look at him sideways, uncertain, but he’s so enthusiastic, and you can tell by the look on his face he wants it so badly.

“I’d protect you,” he adds, softer, sincere.

What else do you really have to lose?

You agree.

 

**Kurloz: Swear Vengeance**

After you watch your moirail die on national television, you fall apart.

Meulin is there for you. She makes you eat. She drags you bodily out of the recuperacoon and into the shower, scrubbing you down because you lack the energy to do it yourself. When you curl into a ball and scream, she curls up with you, her huntress’s arms holding you in place, holding you together. When you tell her you want to die, she begs you to stay, to live, please live, just one more minute, one more hour, one more day, one day at a time because I love you I love you I love you.

And you stay, and you live, one more minute, one more hour, one more day, and then another day, and another, because you love her, you love her and she loves you and you don’t think Mituna would want you to die.

Time passes. You lose track. You wake screaming in the night sometimes, dreaming about him dying, or dreaming about which of your loved ones will be called in the next lottery. Meulin reassures you that there’s just one more sweep and then you’re both safe. The odds are in your favor. It will all be alright.

She encourages you to reach out, to talk to people online. You do it, at first just to pacify her, and then in sincerity. You befriend a boy in the Capitol, one of the royals. You tell him the dark things in your mind.

You give him ideas.

It is the worst mistake you have ever made.

You do not realize it at the time. You still do not realize it when the next lottery comes and your worst fears are made reality, when Meulin’s name is called and she marches up to the stage with her chin held high, trying so very hard to be brave.

You do not realize it until the last days of the Games when she dies in a trap of your own design.

The trap you told a friend in passing.

The trap your friend used to kill your matesprit.

This time, there is no one to hold you when you scream, no one to stop you from breaking the furniture and beating the walls until they run with your blood. No one to bring your mind back from the abyss it retreats to. You are glad. You don’t want to come back from whatever it is you’ve become. You don’t deserve to. You opened your mouth to the wrong person, and it got Meulin killed.

You sew your lips shut as a reminder of your failure.

And you vow that you will find a way to wreck the Empire for all it has taken from you.

 

**Dave: Go Backwards**

You’re six the first time you really try out your powers. The others have been using theirs without hesitation for years already, Jade teleporting through rooms and Rose rattling off endless strings of possible futures and John levitating absolutely everywhere (which is so unfair. He gets the best power.).

You, though, you’ve barely tested the waters. Sure, you’ve tried out using temporal manipulation to give you super-speed, to slow time down for the nearest targets (Roxy, Bro, and Rose, at the time) while you raced ahead to tag Bro’s legs, earning a surprised blink from him and a big squeal from Roxy. But you haven’t tried going backwards yet. Backwards gets confusing, and you know on some level you could really mess things up.

Then a crow flies into your window and breaks its neck and you decide to try going backwards.

Just before you do it, your twin finds you, like she always finds you when you’re about to do something reckless (like you always find her, because of the two of you, she gets herself into far more trouble). She touches her fingertips to the backs of your hands, her Seer eyes piercing straight through you.

“Dave,” she says, quiet and intense. “Don’t do it.”

You ignore her and do it anyway.

It’s harder than you thought it would be; you have to concentrate on all the details from that day, build a perfect mental map of your placement in the greater chronology, not so much where you were, but _when_ you were.

You go back to exactly thirty seconds before the bird hit the window.

You run outside as fast as you can.

Eight seconds to impact by the time you get out and around the complex. You can see the stupid thing coming, flying heedless toward the glass.

You jump into its path.

“Hey! Shoo! Get away!”

The crow gives an indignant squawk and veers right, swerving up and over the building. You follow the line of its flight and allow yourself a smile. You did it. Now you just have to wait to catch up to where you left off before you went back.

Okay, that’s confusing to think about.

Something moves in the corner of your peripheral vision.

You turn and peer through your bedroom window at what you think for a moment is your reflection.

It isn’t. It’s another you.

You stare at each other for a few breathless seconds.

Then the what-the-fuck _-_ factor kicks in and you both panic.

You stumble back and trip on a tree root.

He stumbles back and trips on the leg of the computer chair.

You hit the soft mossy ground.

He hits the corner of the desk with the back of his head.

You get back up.

He doesn’t.

You creep forward, slowly, and press your forehead to the window to see inside.

There’s a pool of blood spreading under the other Dave’s head.

He’s dead.

You know it as soon as you see the blood.

He’s dead.

He’s you, and he’s dead, so _you’re_ dead, but you’re standing here breathing, and breathing, and breathing too fast, and then you just _run_ , as far and as fast as you can get away from seeing your own body lying dead in a blood-puddle, and you keep running, pushing yourself across the grounds until you hit the electric fence on the edge of the Victors’ Village and you go away for a while.

When you come back, someone is screaming and crying and making a racket and there are big hands holding you still while you thrash and try to break free.

“…in his mind, he’s created an unstable time loop.”

“Speak English, Egbert,” says Bro’s voice, a deep, angry growl, and the hands on you tighten. “What the actual fuck is wrong with him?”

And you realize that you’re the one making all the noise. You try to stop and can’t. Bro’s grip on you is too tight and you can still see your own body gushing blood from a head wound and some part of you feels cracked, like you’ve broken a tooth, but the pain isn’t physical.

“Dave’s power is difficult for us to understand because we possess nothing like it,” Dadbert manages over the din of your shrieking. “But when he manipulates time to go backwards and tries to change something, reality splinters. In our timeline—that is, the alpha timeline—we have no knowledge of it. From what I can gather, Dave keeps all those fragmented realities in his mind. If he isn’t careful to fully segment the alternate reality from his alpha self, he ends up with two Daves in one reality, which, for whatever reason, the universe will not tolerate. As far as I can gather, the doppelganger perishes and the alternate reality withers.”

You don’t understand a word he’s saying, but you’ve run out of voice to scream, and now you’re just sucking in big gulps of air.

“The doppelganger perishes? What, like, it dies?”

“That is my understanding, yes.”

“But isn’t it technically a part of him?”

There’s a hesitation before Dadbert answers, his voice sounding older than you’re used to.

“Yes.”

Bro swears.

“And this is all going on in his head?”

“Right again,” Dadbert murmurs, and lays his hands on your head. “But I assure you, to Dave, it is all very real. Can you imagine seeing yourself die?”

“Way too well,” Bro mutters. He picks you up, bouncing you as he walks you back to your room. “Hey, come on, buddy, it’s okay. I’d freak out too, if I had to keep all that shit straight.”

You lean against his chest, exhausted, and for once, he lets you cling to him. You doze in his lap.

“I don’t ever want to do that again,” you mumble, half-asleep.

“You might have to one day, kiddo.”

You make a wordless, miserable sound. Bro curves a gloved hand over the back of your head. Your whole skull fits in his palm.

“I know it sucks,” he says. “But you have to do what you have to do. Great power and great responsibility, and all that shit.”

“I don’t want it.”

There’s a long silence. All you can hear is Bro’s steady heartbeat.

Finally, he says, “I know.”

You burrow into his chest.

“Please don’t leave me.”

“Okay.”

His calloused fingertips card through your hair until you fall asleep. You think—or maybe you just dream it—that he kisses the top of your head.

When you wake up, you’re alone again.

 

**Sollux: Get Your Groove Back**

All you want to do is die, and no one will let you do it.

You’ve tried to jump off the roof, swallow a bunch of pills, stab yourself with scissors, hang yourself with shoelaces, and bash your head into the wall until your brain just shuts off, but goddamn Roxy stops you every fucking time. You tried hurling insults at her your first week, but none of them seemed to stick, so you gave up.

She babysits you almost constantly, and if she can’t be with you, she makes sure that someone else is. That someone else is usually her husband, unnervingly quiet with the occasional piece of overly-apt commentary.

When you’re finally deemed well enough to escape twenty-four hour suicide watch, you get an unexpected visitor.

You open the door and think for a moment that Karkat has somehow taken the Imperial city by force and has showed up at your door to rescue you. If that were actually the case, you wouldn’t mind swooning.

A few seconds later, of course, you realize that’s not the case. The person standing in your doorway is an adult, for one thing, albeit a small adult. You know who he is because everyone on Alterniearth knows who he is.

“Hello, Sollux,” says Kankri Vantas. “Is that your preferred name?”

You nod, thoroughly weirded out.

“Would it be alright if I came inside for a few minutes? I fully understand, of course, if you would find my presence an imposition on your sense of personal well-being.”

“Uh…no, come in, I guess.”

“Thank you.”

He moves so cautiously around you. Odd for an adult. His eyes scan the mess of your living room and a slight crease forms between his eyebrows. You half-expect him to nag you about cleanliness, but he doesn’t. He gestures at a chair.

“May I sit?”

“Sure.”

He sits and you take the couch, picking at a hole in your shirtsleeve with a claw.

“So, what brings a celebrity to my doorstep?” you ask.

Kankri leans his elbows on his knees, his expression neutral.

“Mr. Strider confided in me that you’re having a difficult time of things,” he says, and you bristle.

“How’s it any of his business to go spreading shit around?”

“I assure you, he has not been ‘spreading things around.’ He only told me.”

“It was still none of his business.”

“True, and I understand why you’re upset.”

“So, what, you came here to help me, or some such bullshit?”

Kankri pauses.

“Actually,” he says after a moment. “I was hoping you could help me.”

You make a face.

“Huh?”

“I’m told you’re quite adept with computers.”

“Understatement. But if you want a computer geek, you could just ask Roxy.”

“I’m aware. And it’s not that I distrust Ms. Lalonde, but her position here requires a certain closeness with the current Imperial order that might cause her trouble for this particular project.”

You raise an eyebrow.

“What, are you planning to stage a cyber-coup?”

The corners of his mouth twitch up, brief and genuine, just like Karkat’s smile.

“Nothing quite so seditious.”

“Okay, so what did you have in mind?”

Kankri tucks his legs up under him.

“I need someone to help me set up a secure forum. The whole point is user anonymity, and I’d like someone technically savvy to ensure that. I’m afraid I only know the very basics.”

You give him a dubious look.

“Why all the secrecy? What’s this forum even for?”

Kankri falls quiet for a little while. When he looks up, his eyes are muted, glazed over with the sort of sadness you’d thought you were alone in.

“It’s for people to talk about the Culling Games.”

You stare at him.

“Like…say anything they wanted?”

Kankri nods.

“Without fear of government retaliation,” you mutter. “That’s why you want it secured.”

“Exactly.”

You hug your arms around yourself, jiggling your leg. You need a cigarette.

You need a project.

“Okay,” you say. “I’m in.”

Kankri almost smiles at you. You almost smile back.

               

**Weeks in the Past (But Not Many)**

**Karkat: Decide**

You hate seeing Gamzee cry. You especially hate being the cause of it.

“Best beloved,” he chokes out, clutching you so tightly you think something might fracture. “You can’t do this—you just—it’s motherfuckin’ madness is what it is, ain’t no call or cause for it—”

You stroke his face with bandaged fingers, make sure he’s looking at you, looking at the fresh bruises all over you.

“Shhh. It’s my only way out. You know it is. They’ll never leave me alone if I stay here.”

“I can _protect_ you, motherfucker—”

“Not forever,” you insist. “I can’t stay cooped up in your hive every waking minute for the rest of my life.”

“Only one motherfucker gets to live in those games, Karbro,” Gamzee snarls, his voice ragged. “You might not—you might not—I can’t up and stand it if you leave me, brother—”

You pap him firmly on the cheek.

“And maybe that one motherfucker who lives is me,” you say, projecting more confidence than you feel. “You’ve said it yourself: I’m a stone cold badass. I have a chance. And if I do win, then no one can touch me. No more running scared. I need to do this.” You lower your voice, pleading with your eyes for him to understand. “You know I need to do this.”

Gamzee’s face crumples. He hides it in your shoulder, soaking your shirt, his hands knotted against your back like he thinks he can keep you here forever if he holds you just hard enough.

“I know, motherfucker,” he says at last. “Do what you have to do.”

 

**Days in the Past (But Not Many)**

**Dave: Go Backwards, Redux**

Your name is Dave Strider.

You are nearly fourteen years old.

And you are _tired_.

You are tired of strifing.

You are tired of irony.

You are tired of being the dead weight that your friends feel obligated to drag around.

You are tired of watching kids your age slaughter each other year after year after year and no one giving a shit.

You are tired of sore muscles and keeping a cool head and helping Rose carry Roxy stumbling drunk onto the couch and working, working, working _so hard_ for Bro to approve of you, to look at you and see you as a person, and knowing he won’t, he can’t, he can’t because he never wanted you, and if he had to pick a kid to form the barest attachment to it would be Rose because she’s clever and sharp-witted like he is, she’s useful and _better_ , and you think that maybe Roxy loves you, but you can’t accept it because you know she never wanted you either, and how the fuck do you even live with the knowledge that you are the reason your mother drinks, you are the reason she cries in the night when she thinks no one’s awake?

So one day, you just decide you’re not going to do any of it anymore. You are done with this angsty teenage bullshit. Dave Strider out, bitches.

You walk out to the electric fence surrounding the compound and grab hold of the live current.

And you die.

But then

reality does something

You think

it splinters.

And you are back in your room again, and you feel different. Still Dave. But a very slightly different Dave.

You remember yourself dying. You remember how it hurt a lot more than you thought it would. You’re sure it happened. You didn’t dream it or make it up in your head. You killed yourself.

And still, here you are.

You haven’t fucked with time loops since you were a little kid, not since you watched yourself die.

But you guess you played the go-backwards game again. You don’t know if you closed the loop right or not, if the Dave who killed himself is now a Dave who technically never existed, or if he was just another doomed Dave in an offshoot, another timeline screw-up. Another dead piece of you sliced off.

You’ve heard that amputees still feel phantom pain in their lost limbs. You wonder if this is anything like that.

Either way, you were dead, and now you’re not.

That’s the moment you realize how powerful you are.

You could alter the past, the alpha-timeline past, if you got good enough and you did it right.

You could make things better.

You could ruin everything.

And nothing has ever terrified you more than your own potential.

 

**Seconds in the Past (But Not Many)**

 

**Be Kanaya**

Your name is Kanaya Maryam.

You are holding Sollux Captor’s hand so tightly your fingers ache.

And you are both watching your friends run to their deaths.


End file.
